Web Programming – Assembler:Java is like Web 2.0 programming:?

As Kevin Kelly pointed out in 2007 in his seminal talk Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web, the Web is one huge machine. We have different views on it (be it as a humans through HTML or a machine consuming RDF), but it is one machine.

A machine that can be and actually is programmed. Ok, so we know that there is the data (yeah, TimBL, right, tell it them people: GIMME YOUR RAW DATA) and we are developer, right.

Let’s step back. May I quiz you a bit? So, tell me, Assembler:Java is like Web 2.0 programming:?.

My two cents are: the ? is a bunch of Web of Data technologies such as URIs, RDF, SPARQL, and now voiD. Rather than learning new APIs and proprietary formats based on XML or the like , one learns the RDF data model, then some vocabularies such as FOAF, SIOC, etc. and maybe some domain-specific ones. Then, one exploits linked data, that is the datasets that are already available on the Web, and starts developing her application.